T he clock is literally ticking at Kehler Liddell Gallery, where this year’s annual group show explores themes of time and space. Two clocks with collage faces—the creations of member artist and gallery director Liz Antle-O’Donnell—measure the actual time in one corner of the gallery. And a recent experiment invited viewers to move through the exhibition to the signal of a chime, which kept them in front of each piece for a full minute.
It seems only appropriate, then, that Time and Space, on view through December 20, is replete with interesting photography—the art form that documents both a time and a space. In Alan Shulik’s Hammonasset Seascape 2019, a fat finger of driftwood points out to sea, its crags and cracks tinted pink by a setting sun. Marjorie Gillette Wolfe’s Matera is a gorgeous panoramic photograph of the hilltop city in southern Italy, the curve of its low, brown-toned skyline suggesting the curve of the earth itself where it meets a cloudbound sky. These beautiful traditional landscapes are rendered with a keen eye.
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Other photographers play more overtly with the exhibition’s theme and with the form itself. In Ghost of New York Deli, street photographer Hank Paper links past and present. A wall mural in an outpost of the iconic New York eatery Russ & Daughters located at The Jewish Museum provides the backdrop. In the mural’s sepia photograph, two workers in white coats man the deli’s seafood counter and an old-fashioned cash register. In front of them, in full color, 21st-century patrons kibitz over coffee on a bench. One sepia-toned figure—an old woman clutching a handbag—seems to have stepped out of the background. She’s passing through the image’s lower corner, unnoticed by the others.
Playful, too, are Brian T. Flinn’s digital collages, which seem to tell tiny, surreal stories. In Landscape Fragment No. 6, a forested game of hide-and-seek features a tuxedoed man, a long-skirted woman and a black bird that’s fleeing the scene. Initials carved in the closest tree suggest love play, but who is that small figure strolling down the trunk of a farther tree? A full moon peeks in, while some other mysterious light source bathes parts of the scene in a purple glow.
Jeffrey L. Gangwisch brings the most unusual photographic treatment to Time and Space in his series of two-dimensional prints of three-dimensional photographs, titled simply by their file names. Streaks of light on a black background give images of the human body an otherworldly character, like bioluminescent deep-sea creatures. In the bottommost image, human legs reach out from a rounded mass twisted with cords of light. The shape brings to mind a human heart, pumping the energy of light at its core out through the arteries of its appendages.
In his series of small photographs, Mark K. St. Mary plays with the ordinary geometry of recycling and trash bins, pillars and posts, the edges of shadows, the measure of driveways. The images themselves are stacked on the gallery wall in an echo of the symmetries they record. The titles of St. Mary’s pieces are part of the fun—Oi! That’s My Driveway!, *Clean Restrooms*, Too Late for Last Stop—suggesting stories of the adventures behind the images themselves.
Time and Space isn’t all about photography; it offers up painting, drawing, pottery and sculpture as well. In addition to regular Friday and Saturday hours, visitors can register for a private 30-minute Date Night at the gallery next week for up to four friends, followed by dinner from Amaru Peruvian Bistro around the corner.
Time seems to wrinkle and space to contract in our current pandemic predicament, making Time and Space timely. Kehler Liddell’s artists give us a few new ways of seeing both.
Time and Space
Kehler Liddell Gallery – 873 Whalley Ave, New Haven (map)
Fri-Sat 11am-2pm and by appointment through December 20 | Date Night
(203) 389-9555
www.kehlerliddellgallery.com/viewing-room-time-and-space |
Written by Kathy Leonard Czepiel. Image 1 provided courtesy of Liz Antle-O’Donnell. Image 2 provided courtesy of Marjorie Gillette Wolfe. Image 3 provided courtesy of Jeffrey L. Gangwisch.
